Raindrops
by Acey Dearest
Summary: Complete. When circumstances force Juunanagou to move in with his sister and her family at the Kame House, he has to figure out how to somehow cope with this new reality.
1. Good Morning

"Raindrops" by Acey  
  
Disclaimer: I own some ancient stuffed animals, two or three dozen notebooks stuffed under my bed filled with manga drawings fanfiction, short stories, and a few other things like that. Not DBZ.  
  
Author's Note: Slight A/U. As in slight. Nothing major. Sorry for not updating "Letters," but I do hope this and the few chapters to follow it will tide you over.  
  
He stood and gazed approvingly, mockingly at his reflection in the mirror, letting the trademark smirk creep up on the features of his ageless face. The frozen sky blue eyes set into his pale face were too flawless to be entirely believable; Gero had erred on the side of near-perfection as far as his looks had gone. The gold hoop earrings and slanted black eyebrows under raven hair completed the picture. Juunanagou, number seventeen in a too-long list of a madman's experiments. The soulless piece of glass would defy him for the next eon.  
He turned away from the harsh facade and went to the bookshelf without pausing, aimlessly pulling a dusty novel from it. Juunanagou turned to the first page automatically, skipping the copyright page and dedication.  
"'Call me Ishmael."'  
Oh, no. Not "Moby Dick." He spent his eternity creating diversions for himself, but Melville's classic whale story was too much. He put it back immediately, wondering idly why he even had it on his bookshelf.  
His mind instantly told him that it wasn't his house. It was that midget's, that Kuririn's little pink home in the middle of the ocean.   
Well, not technically Kuririn's-- all told, the ancient martial arts teacher was still too much alive for very many people's liking, but in the event of Roshi's death the place would invariably go to his faithful pupil. Juunanagou would have staked money on that.  
Roshi's house.  
The world couldn't get any crueler.  
  
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His sister found him a few minutes later still standing at the shelf, searching through the classics, stacking those he felt were not interesting after a glance at the first page or paragraph in a pile on the floor. Her presence seemingly remained unnoticed by her twin, and she picked up one of the books and turned it to see the title on the worn spine.  
"'Moby Dick,'" she said quietly in her customary monotone, still unchanged after almost two decades. "You're not intending on reading it, are you?"  
"No," he replied, turning to face her. "Have you?"  
"Yes," she said, which vaguely surprised him, but the slight flicker in his gaze left before Juuhachigou had the chance to acknowledge it. "It's all right. It's about an old man who goes on a rampage to kill this one particular whale."  
He didn't respond. The silence that followed threw Juuhachigou off and she immediately searched for another topic.  
"Marron made the banner outside."  
Whether or not it was a true banner was debatable, Juunanagou thought as he nodded, seeing as it was apparently constructed from taped-together newspapers, but nonetheless the thought put into it was obvious. His niece had worked hard, oddly hard on the banner for the uncle she didn't even know that read in capital letters of blue construction paper "Welcome, Uncle Juunanagou!"   
"She's very excited. She even cleaned her room up before you came."  
Juunanagou nodded again and let another book fall into the discard pile on the floor.  
"It's been awhile, you know. Marron's thirteen now."  
He knew that miscellaneous fact in the back of his mind. It hadn't really dawned on him until he heard Juuhachigou announce it.  
"Really."  
"Really. It doesn't seem that long, though, does it?"  
The nonsense of the question probed him into sarcasm.  
"How should I know, Juuhachi? I haven't seen her once."  
"You will pretty soon. Give her a minute to wake up. Seventeen years go by too quickly."  
Seventeen years. Seventeen years in a cabin surrounded by acres of land, only three of which were actually his. Seventeen years of hearing nothing but crickets when he went to bed, seventeen years of seeing the gloomy landscape designated "forest," seventeen years.  
She was wrong, so totally wrong it was almost humorous. That space of years had gone by in the most incredibly slow manner possible.   
  
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Juuhachigou misread the look on his face.  
"You old egomaniac. You're not going to die anytime soon, if ever. Stop looking down like you're afraid your hands are going to deteriorate if you quit staring at them."  
Juunanagou blatantly ignored her and resumed. They were pale hands, neither showing any normal wear or proof of any of the hard labor he'd done. No calluses. No scratch marks or half-healed cuts. None. He put them down.  
"Mama?"  
The caustic, cynical bitterness that was such a characteristic of the sister that he once thought he knew so well disappeared from her face, softening it, as she turned to smile slightly at her nightgown-clad daughter at the top of the stairs.  
"Good morning, Marron."   
"Good morning," she replied, eyes widening slightly as she saw Juunanagou. "Good morning, Uncle Juunanagou!"  
"Good morning."  
"Do you want me to make breakfast?" Juuhachigou asked, an offer Marron promptly refused.  
"It's okay. I'll get something. Want to come with me, Uncle Juunanagou?"  
"Fine," he replied, nonchalant, leaving what had become the entire contents of the bookshelf on the floor in its lone stack. "Fine."  
  
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Marron proceeded to escort her uncle into the kitchen, talking as she went in.  
"I hope you stay here. Mama says you won't but I hope you will. Do you like the island? I do, but I've always lived here. It's only about a mile across, but if you want, I could show it all to you--"  
"I've been here before," he responded in an effort to stop the conversation.   
"Oh."   
She pulled a cookie sheet from the cupboard as she reached with the other arm to get the bread from the magnet-covered refrigerator, unconscious multi-tasking. Marron set down the bread and began again like there was no interruption.   
"How was it in the woods, then? Was it nice?"  
He paused, contemplating the question. In all his life, no one had ever asked him anything about where he lived. And here was this niece of his asking if it was "nice."  
"If you don't count the mosquitoes, squirrels, and various poor weather conditions, sure, it was nice," he said in cold sarcasm, and left it at that.  
  
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Acey: Nope. Not finished. I have a few more chapters to go, but until I update, I hope you enjoyed it. 


	2. Confrontation

"Raindrops" by Acey  
  
Disclaimer: DBZ is Mr. Toriyama's, and for making up the Dragon Ball world and its unique, wonderful characters, I, Acey, thank him sincerely.   
  
  
For the next ten minutes Marron continued to annoy him, barely pausing for breath between long, frenzied sentences and questions while she buttered the bread slices.   
"Is toast okay? Mama can't cook, so I do. Don't tell her that or she'll get really, really mad at you. If you want I can make eggs or oatmeal..."  
It took a massive effort on the part of Juunanagou to keep from dryly informing her that eating was optional in his case, and that if her version of eggs was as unhealthy-appearing as her version of toast, he'd rather not have either.  
"I'm fine."  
"So you want toast, Uncle Juunanagou? Okay."  
She slathered, if at all possible, more butter on a piece of it and continued with the sugar, fairly evenly pouring what looked like four tablespoonfuls on each slice, still speaking rapidly, amazingly enough.  
"Daddy should be waking up soon. Don't worry. If he doesn't, Mama'll wake him up. He didn't get to meet you when you came in last night, either. But you know Daddy, so that shouldn't be a problem. Don't you?" And onward the harrassingly bright, cheerful tones went as the possessor of the voice at last stuck the bread in the oven and put it on custom broil.  
Kuririn. A midget from a monastery. A human fool that had somehow caught his sister's eye long enough to propose to her and be accepted, marrying her, even fathering the child that stood talking aimlessly in front of him.  
Oh, yes, he knew Kuririn.  
  
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True to his daughter's report, he emerged within five minutes, half asleep, led in by Juuhachigou. He had failed to notice that his collection of books now lay in a pile on the floor, bookcase standing empty. Kuririn had very nearly missed even his wife's presence when she got him out of bed, thinking and hoping that he was still dreaming.  
Juunanagou sitting in a wooden-backed chair in the middle of his kitchen did not escape his sleepy attention.  
"Juuhachigou! Your brother, he's here! Get out! Take Marron and go, Juuhachi-- I'll take care of him! Go!"  
Kuririn jumped to his feet, drowsiness completely gone. Reflexes acquired from thousands of days, so many years spent training made him automatically go into a fighting stance, knees bent, fists balled up in front of his face as a defense.   
The severe contrast would have been very humorous had it not been for the sheer intensity in the former monk's gaze up at the young man, who, smirking suddenly, stood now derisively in front of him. There was no good-naturedness in those sooty black eyes any longer. Kuririn's face was set in stone, grim, determined, mind made completely up. He was going to attack, at least buy enough time to let Juuhachi and his daughter leave, just enough for them. Then at least he could die knowing that they were safe. Every memory of the fact that he had close friends who would very much be able to destroy the cyborg in front of him had left his mind. He wasn't thinking about them. He was thinking of his wife and child.  
Juunanagou took stock of the situation and stood waiting in amusement for his brother-in-law to begin the ill-fated onslaught. If the human was idiot enough to try to kill him, he could by all means go ahead. Kuririn could go ahead with the lunacy and attempt to fight. He wouldn't move an inch.   
Juuhachigou, unfortunately enough, behaved with the first bit of sense her brother had seen her display in years.  
"Kuririn! Wake up!"  
Her husband blinked and she strode over to him.   
"He's not here to kill us! Don't you remember? Kuririn, my brother lives here now!"  
"What-- Juuhachi?"  
"Remember? Juunanagou came in last night, right before--"  
"The earthquake," Kuririn finished, quickly lowering his defenses to their normal level for one who has stared death straight in the face many more times than he would have ever prefered to. "I'm sorry."  
Juuhachigou advanced to her brother.  
"And you! You would have let him fight you if I hadn't stopped him!"  
He said nothing, not bothering to remove the derisive look on his face. Juuhachigou rolled her eyes in total disgust, not realizing that that was the last thing Juunanagou wanted her to do, as she sat down and stared at her plate like she was waiting, even willing it to explode in front of her face, oblivious to any consolation her brother would never give.  
Hastily, Marron glanced in the oven and announced that breakfast was ready.  
  
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	3. Car

"Raindrops" by Acey  
  
Disclaimer: Don't you think that my computer would not be half my age if I owned DBZ?   
  
Breakfast was not bad. Unhealthy, more than likely cavity-inducing, but better than anything a health-conscious mind ever cooked up. Juunanagou would admit that much at least to himself as he swallowed the sugar-coated piece of toast.  
Marron had quit talking, and the stony silence now was almost worse. His sister was still seemingly ignoring everything but her plate, except for an occasional sharp glare in Juunanagou's direction. Kuririn was trying to find something to say but came up short, and in the end just shrugged and started to eat.   
Roshi and his turtle were upstairs, forgotten about by everyone in the household in event of the disasterous meeting, probably still sleeping. Hopefully still sleeping. Oolong had left the premises soon after he'd found out about the new resident, taking all magazines with him, an action that, when discovered, would not please Roshi in the least.  
"Do you want more toast--"  
Not this again.   
"-- Mom?"  
"No," Juuhachigou replied tersely. "I'm fine."  
"I'll take some," Kuririn said as Marron passed the plate over. He selected a piece and paused, looking again for a conversation topic. Juunanagou noticed that much of his composure and calm had returned in the past several minutes.  
"I'm sorry about that, Juunanagou," he said again. "Silly of me."  
His brother-in-law didn't respond, but his blue eyes flashed slightly with a look of jeering malice that Kuririn caught on to from long experience with his enemies and avoided Juunanagou's gaze for what was left of the meal.   
Juuhachigou was not so tactful, nor was she afraid in the slightest of her twin. She set down her napkin and pushed her plate away from the table with such abrupt force that it fell to the floor and shattered, pieces flying everywhere. Juuhachigou ignored it with a completeness bordering on amazing.  
"Well?"  
"Well?" he repeated boredly, meeting her eyes, so normally cold, unfeeling chips of cerulean, now burning with passion.  
"You could apologize. Acknowledge Kuririn, say something to him! Treat him like a human being!"  
Marron was staring at her mother in astonishment, round eyes large on her face. Kuririn's features, Juunanagou realized abruptly in anger as he stood once more. Kuririn's child. His sister-- his sister, curse it-- and the midget's daughter. Juunanagou fixed his eyes on the image, willing it to go away. His niece turned her head.  
He barely managed an icy response.  
"Why should I when I'm not one myself," he said, and he strode to the door of the Kame House and left the island.  
  
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Such a simple thing. An earthquake, a shaking of the ground. And the last bit of a mix of pity and sisterly love all that had made Juuhachigou get him from his cabin when she found out where it was going to hit. Juuhachigou, the good twin, the one smart enough to befriend the enemy she could no longer defeat, had gone to his forsaken cabin in the rain the night before and demanded, insisted, that Juunanagou come with her.  
Quite possibly the last decent thing she had done for him since her marriage, despite the dutiful visits every so often that hardly counted. Juunanagou ignored the thought as he flew to the mainland, hair and bandana getting in his face to a small but annoying extent as he did so, eyes scanning coldly through the area as it appeared in view and he landed.  
He pushed his bandana back into place, still searching, looking past the rather frightened spectators that had seen him land, past the looming buildings of business that implied the supposed importance of the city.   
A car. He wanted a car, something inanimate to take his frustrations out on and at the same time get somewhere, anywhere at all, no matter. A fast car, makeshift and color irrelevant as long as it could go, and go as quickly as possible. He found what he was looking for in a moment and went toward it.  
"Excuse me. Excuse me, that's my car--"  
A glare and a gun pointed lazily at the unknown passerby's chest silenced him, making him immediately drop his keys and run like a coward. Juunanagou didn't feel it was a sight worth smirking over. The reaction was far too easy to achieve.  
He picked up the keys and unlocked the car door.  
  
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Juunanagou pushed the accelerator as far as it would go without breaking it, driving with no caution whatsoever but to keep from having a collision with another vehicle, easy enough. It was an older model anyway, flightless, capabilities limited to laws of gravity without loopholes anywhere.   
What few cars were on the road barely paused before turning in the other direction, the ones in the air staying put. An old man from an aircar leaned out the window and yelled:  
"Go ahead. H--- ain't half full yet" before his coddling daughter pulled him back into his seat and told him that the police could handle such things themselves. The old man's reply was muffled but snappish, and Juunanagou ignored it. The police had already latched themselves to his trail, anyway. A few more minutes and they would have him. Not that it mattered.  
He picked up speed, and waited for a moment, looking out the mirror to see the police behind him, idly wondering if they had anything better to do than to chase things that moved. He had picked a decently fast car. They refused to match it, giving up halfheartedly with disappointment and irritation showing plainly on their faces, and he ignored it and continued on his way.  
  
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	4. Reclamation

"Raindrops" by Acey  
  
Author's Note: Sorry for the wait-- I actually have some very good excuses concerning it, but I'm not going to list them. Suffice it to say that a lot came up between last update and now. =) Don't fret, I will and am continuing.  
  
Disclaimer: If I owned DBZ, the characters would hardly do more than stand and talk because of my lack of ability at drawing action poses. Or many DBZ characters in general.  
  
He continued, letting the scenes replay themsleves as he took a left on to another highway, people, regardless of what they were driving (if they were even driving at all) moving immediately out of his way, police, determined, unaware of the futility of attempting the chase. The roads there were damaged somewhat, broken from the earthquake of the night before, but overall it was the same scenario, played by a different cast. The only one from the original ensemble was Juunanagou. Juunanagou, looking out the rearview mirror at the chaos.  
It failed for the first time to bring any expression of sadistic satisfaction to his face to mock the inferiority of the humans. In the old days Juuhachigou would have rolled her eyes at him at this and said something caustically affectionate, if that were possible. He would have replied in turn, cutting her down somewhat as well, but they were pretenses, jokes. Behind the malice had been a slightly kinder side.  
He glared, eyes, created to view anything and everything worth looking at but still unseeing as he turned finally from the sight and toward his destination.  
  
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Juuhachigou took notice of the shards of the plate on the floor and picked up the broom and dustpan in the corner, mind elsewhere, blue eyes the only savage note on an otherwise impassive face. A face and mindset meant to prove the uselessness of the things referred to as human emotions, a maddeningly flawless masterpiece of science in a severely flawed world. Nothing was ever truly intended to exist behind the outward beauty but mechanisms. Mechanisms and the tiniest piece of the organic left over as an afterthought, an unreachable memory of what had been and what would never be again.  
She swept the floor with less efficiency than a car without fuel, angry still.   
Juunanagou had never possessed much luck that she recalled. His humanity had been gone for close to twenty years, maybe more. He had been absorbed and killed by a monster, had then been blown up along with the planet seven years later, left to live like an exile in the woods, an exile with no apparent reason for the banishment.  
No, there was reason behind it, she thought as she pushed away the fragments absentmindedly with her broom. Pride. Egotism, holding him back, forever keeping her brother her doppelganger. Immature, juvenile pride that ought to have been long since forgotten.   
"Juuhachi?"  
She glanced up and found her husband, sooty eyes concerned under black hair, compassion and a willingness to help almost written on his face. Kindness, compassion.   
Human decency outdid stark perfection any day.  
"Yes."  
"Your brother-- he'll--"  
Juuhachigou let the few fragments she had swept up fall into the trash can before facing Kuririn.  
"He won't come back."  
  
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Juunanagou passed through another town, each more rural than the last, traffic (if there was any) to a bare minimum, pedestrians slim to none. He let them walk on. They could go ahead and live for awhile longer. There wasn't any pleasure in it, at least, there wasn't any at the moment. He was getting closer anyway, the broken road and number of earthquake-fallen trees told him that much easily. A little longer left, that was all, and he'd be back.   
iWhy take a car when you can fly?/i  
Juuhachi. Likely not her exact words, but the same meaning, same implication, in her slightly dull monotone. His sister, her husband's angel and daughter's mother who reportedly couldn't cook, the decent one. She had come--  
He shook his head in frustration and aimed a blast at the first thing he saw, barely stopping the car before doing so, barely bothering to check to see what it was that he had hit.  
It had been a memory. Just a memory, a recording, really, found in a myriad file and replayed unconsiously in his mind, so he thought that he heard her, thought that he heard her double-edged remark of almost two decades before. A miserable, unwitting attempt at self-consolation.  
He left the car four miles from his target and flew the rest of the way.  
  
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Marron took down her sign at the front of the Kame House's door, folding it halfheartedly and stuffing it in a box full of faded holiday decorations from the years before, left to be forgotten for good.   
"'Welcome, Uncle Juunanagou,"' she read from her banner, unsurely, not knowing whether to be bitter or to just attempt to hope for the best. Closing the box, she chose the latter and went back upstairs to see if Master Roshi was awake. "'Welcome.'"  
  
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He found it thirty-one point six-seven-four seconds later according to his internal clock. Or what was left of it. A few small masses of logs nailed together had remained, rubble, nothing more.   
So Juuhachigou had been right. The earthquake had been coming directly in his cabin's direction, and had destroyed it.  
Fine. He could rebuild the thing, and rebuild it soon, if he didn't start with the old game of seeing just how long it would take if he tried to do it with next to no strength. Their strength, the human strength. An hour or so, give or take ten minutes, if he didn't try to divert himself with that distraction.  
'Nails, you idiot,' he thought. 'See if there're still enough--'  
"Juunanagou."  
  
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	5. Raindrops

"Raindrops" by Acey  
  
Disclaimer: I own next to nothing of value (a coin collection, a porcelain "Gone with the Wind" Bonnie doll I've had since I was five [not in mint condition, however], a boombox). DBZ is something of value. Therefore, it's an extremely safe bet that I don't own it.  
  
Author's Note: That was too long of a wait (especially for a cliffhanger). But I couldn't let this fic die out. It's kind of close to my heart. No more delays-- this being the last chapter.  
  
Author's Other Delaying and Not Pertaining to the Story Note: My mother's birthday (November 7) was today. =)  
  
He turned around instantly out of pure reflex, not scanning in the figure before doing so, uncharacteristic, but it was rationality that kept him from it.  
There was no real need to bother. Goku's presence had been obvious from the first syllable he had spoken of his name, a programmed-in voice stored in a chip of memory. Goku, black hair sticking up in rather random spikes around his head, carrot-orange gi, what seemed in Juunanagou's biased mind to be a forever-present idiotic look on his face. The man that by all rights, intents, and purposes, should have died of a heart virus years before, or, if needs be that the time traveler had to come, blown up by a monster. Different way to end the same life. A life of purehearted naivety, a life spent defending the planet that he wasn't even born on. A heroic life.  
Juunanagou stared him straight in the eye, defiantly silent. None of that seemed to fluster Goku as it had his twin, and he went on.  
"You're Juuhachigou's brother! Someone-- I think it was Kuririn-- told me you lived around here, but I never really gave it much thought. I guess Kuririn only knew anyway because of your sister telling him, or something. Well, nice to see you, then!"  
The man honestly believed that Juunanagou had reformed just as his sister had done, a naive thought if ever there was one. Goku had stared evil in the faces of dozens of monsters and still attempted to see a good side, to warn them, to give them the slightest chance of escape from combat. Yet with the escape came a price (for wasn't there always a price for the things you desired?), to end their reigns of terror, to better themselves for the safety of everyone on Earth and elsewhere.   
Few, if any, were ever or would ever be prepared to do this. The claimed little good in evil was not present in a fiber of their beings. So, holding to their pride, they would refuse the offer and plummet fast to their own destruction.  
Goku paused, a look of slight worry, question, on his face.  
"That's your house! Isn't it?" he said, apparently noticing the scattered wood and rubble on the ground. "What happened to it?"  
  
  
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Kuririn returned the books to their shelf, alphabetically. Dickens, Hugo, Melville, Mitchell, Poe, Scott, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Twain, and more. The classics, with their daring heroes and evil villians, their doomed romances and dying hopes, their quests and journeys ranging from insane to valiant. The characters so well-defined as to be complete, real, on the faded pages. He set them all back to their proper placement, the placement they were in before Juunanagou had come.  
It did not take him long. His brother-in-law, with few exceptions, had taken each novel from the bookshelf in the order they were already in when he had piled them into stacks, probably unconsiously. Kuririn noticed this as he glanced at the spines and covers of the books, and so picked half-stacks at a time up and pushed them into the shelf, as many as would go in each shelf piece. He felt a near-guilt as he did so, realizing that the bookshelf stacks had been the only visible change to the house since Juunanagou's arrival.   
'That, and a broken plate,' he thought grimly. Not to mention that his brother-in-law had through every fault of his own caused all the tension in the house that morning.  
Kuririn stopped himself. He shouldn't be so quick to judge, so condemning. Juunanagou was his wife's brother; Kuririn should try to think civilly of him, regardless of how hostilely he returned that.   
The former monk sighed and left the room.   
  
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What happened to it. A pertinent question for someone like him, like Goku, so aware of others' strength and power but blank on matters concerning natural disasters. Such disasters as earthquakes were the only things left that would and did occur without human intervention, and as such made them still feared by many.  
Perhaps not so blank. The man before Juunanagou blinked for a second.  
"Earthquake?"  
How brilliant, Juunanagou thought as he turned from the face back to the rubble, the guileless face so altogether unlike his own. The face bored him because of its lack of deviance, its good-naturedness, annoyed him as he saw none of his own characteristics or lack there of in it. Annoyed him further as he realized the man was wanting to assist him.  
He let him wait, but Goku continued as if there had been no silence.  
"Do you need any help putting it back up?"  
At last Juunanagou spoke to the alien, spoke bitterly, with all the caustic pessimism he had echoing into the sentence.  
"This cabin was here for seventeen years. It stood that long without your help--" and Goku, chilled by the tone of the words, stunned, barely managed an unanswered "Are you sure?" before he left the forest.  
The cyborg noticed it only then that there were raindrops falling on the ground.  
  
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He never returned to the Kame House, nor was he seen anywhere else but in the tree-covered woods by lone hunters, woodsman, the rare hopeful dreamer who wanted to see nature in a time when nature was more commonly found in museums. They saw him, on occasion, posture straight in bravado, cerulean eyes constantly mocking, like a computer on a default setting. They saw him never for what he was but for what he had been, assuming his humanity in a statement like "I think that's the person who lives in that cabin without the windows" when it had been gone for longer than anyone alive knew. They saw Juunanagou.  
No one else, from Juuhachigou to Kuririn to Marron to Goku, involved with his stay at the pink house on the island, ever did again.  
  
finis 


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